Recently there was a lot of talk of us leaving Eris Evolution, our weekly residency, where we transitioned No Return Post Punk Society from Pyramid after word of their initial closing and eventually created Club Nihil ( a 2 floor party) with the partnership of DJ Grave. And, for good reason, we WERE going to leave. No issue with the venue, of course, but the weekly workload was overwhelming particularly as some of us started working full time again (we began there before many of our jobs were back) and Grave was leaving.

However, we worked a deal out with management and No Return will be staying at Eris and will be returning, the original crew, every 3rd Friday of the month. Eris ownership will continue a Friday dark dance party every other week. We’re NOT associated with those events even though they also go under the “Club Nihil” name, however we hope they do well and we appreciate that they’re building off of the foundation that we helped lay at Eris over the past year.

November 18th will be our first day back and it will be No Cover all night, a shift from our usual $10 presale and $12 before midnight. There will still be nights with a cover charge, and newsletter subscribers will get discounts for those evenings, when we have live musical performances. Otherwise, the nights will be free. Upstairs on the main floor will be Goth Rock, Darkwave, Post-punk and live performances such as bands and burlesque. In the champagne lounge will be a rotating mix of our sister party Friday I’m in Love (who joined us at Eris pre-Club Nihil) which is a dark-electro/italo disco party, Mesh & Lace new wave/80s, and Techno Vault with Ian Ford depending on the night. It’s our wildcard room and where the after hours takes place. The bunker is where we have Industrial, EBM, Dark EDM, Industrial Rock, and the like.

We hope you’re not disappointed in us taking a bit of a step back as far as frequency but I can assure you, had I not worked this out the party would have crashed totally, it was simply too much to keep up with at the previous pace. But we feel like we’re at a good place and this will also give us time to guest DJ at other parties and venues.

As always, we look forward to seeing you on the dance floor soon!

Best,

Ryan Walker & the NRPPS team

The Pyramid Promoters: moments after we removed the last of our things from Pyramid’s basement.

It’s hard to write what hasn’t already been written, especially trying to consume into a short blog post what Pyramid Club has meant to us, to many of you, and to NYC’s counterculture in general. So instead I’ll take this brief time to offer it, and Q (also known as DJ TM8), a thank you for being our home since 2015.

No Return Post Punk Society before Pyramid was a happy hour dive bar party. We were residents at Arrow Bar (before it closed), Arlene’s Grocery (before they let go of all of their daytime DJs), and then made guest appearances at Ottos and other lower east side dives. A friend, and regular of our happy hour parties, was leaving the city and I had decided to throw her a surprise going away party at Pyramid Club. After the party Q offered me a regular spot. Scrambling for another DJ I brought on another of our regulars, who many of you now know as The Maldic!on (who had only DJed one set previously), and shortly after had Alex Von Nihil introduced to me.

And that’s how we became what we are now. If it weren’t for Pyramid, who knows where we’d be. But now it’s time to look towards the future.

Tomorrow we will be looking at a new venue that has taken on two of Pyramid’s upstairs 80s parties and apparently hosts a vast basement space. If it checks out I will meet with the owner next week and continue to plan. Things are difficult with covid restrictions being as they are but once things open up we plan to have a new venue in place. We know Pyramid Club, the place, may be gone, but the people and the spirit live on and we look forward to seeing you in the future.

Whew! So I wanted to check in our Blog since it’s been…wait, how many years since we kept up with this? Particularly with some updates on how you can keep up with our music during the “dark days of Covid”.

Firstly, we hope that you’re all doing all right, Covid aside, we know that this has been a particularly difficult year. Lots of our friends and neighbors suffering from depression and really just trying to do whatever can be done to stay productive and stay social while staying safe/compliant isn’t easy for anyone. So, again, we hope that you and your loved ones are hanging tough right now.

As I type this Pyramid Club has still not reopened and if we were to guess our expectations are that it will not open until some point in 2021, and if I were a betting man I would put $20 on April. But I’m not and I don’t have $20 to throw away right now so I’m just openly speculating. As an alternative my DJ partner, Janssen, has taken to Twitch (as have many of the nightclub DJs) and does virtual club nights with live chat and requests.

You can find and subscribe to him on Twitch @ Twitch.tv/Cityasylum or just searching City Asylum should bring his page up.

I’ve been working on trying to put together a live internet radio broadcast, a project that had MANY more moving parts than I had originally anticipated, but am pretty much set up to go. Our player can be found right on our website at noreturnpostpunksociety.com/radio

My hope is to do sort of a 9-5 broadcast monday through friday, or possibly 12-5, and one of those days I’ll make it a live set, the rest being premixes. It’s figuring out those little details, like “when will I be reliably available to do broadcasts?” Ultimately I’d like to have something set up that you all reliably know will be playing on a day to day basis whenever you’re in the mood. And as always it’s a mix of new, classic, and obscure stuff.

But, anyhow, that’s what we’ve been working on and where you’ll be able to hear and see us. Currently we’re preparing for a Halloween live stream on twitch.tv/cityasylum on Halloween at 10pm until 4am. We’ll have lights, fog, and blue tooth speakers. It’ll be our first time DJing together since back in March at the Pyramid Club so we’re jazzed for it.

Stay safe out there friends!

— Ryan